I think car sharing solutions like DriveNow (https://us.drive-now.com/how-it-works/) are much better for this case. Instead of giving your own car to somebody else, it is much easier to drive to the airport in one of the car sharing cars and drop it at the airport, where somebody else can use it to drive back to the city. DriveNow already allow free parking at the San Francisco airport and they are expanding very fast so I think it will be a really valuable service soon.
Airport Car Rentals: The Next $10 Billion Industry Ready For Disruption
31–40 of 49 posts
Re: Airport Car Rentals: The Next $10 Billion Industry Ready For Disruption
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree on the second point, but then again, I'd never rent my house out with Airbnb either, and apparently they've done well. Different people have different tolerances for risk.
It's hard to impossible to damage your house by the renter so that the damage stays hidden. With car, it is pretty easy and the costs of such damages when you discover them afterwards would be realatively high.
It might be riskier, but most of the time nothing's going to happen either way. And I'd rather have someone trash my car, if insurance covers it, than trash my house.
Re: Airport Car Rentals: The Next $10 Billion Industry Ready For Disruption
#33Frequent travelers and members of rewards programs aren’t treated that differently Um, actually we are. With Avis First (free to join) or Hertz Gold (last I knew there was a fee, but that may have changed), I take a shuttlebus to the rental car lot (or at the smaller airports, walk from the gate to the rental lot), look for my name on the message board, walk over to my car, get in, drive to the gate, show the attenda…
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Re: Airport Car Rentals: The Next $10 Billion Industry Ready For Disruption
#34I don't see much potential here.
Airport car rental is mostly grunt work. Moving cars, storing them, valeting them, maintaining them, filling them with gas, sorting out insurance, customer service, screening customers, chasing late returns, pursuing people for damages, so on and so forth. 5% booking interface, 95% on the ground work.
There is already healthy competition in the market, and the incumbents do a pretty good job. There are lots of moving parts, so things often go wrong, but it's hard to do better.
Who cares about a shiny iPhone app? The existing companies already have passable online interfaces, and if they don't already have iPhone apps they have the capital to roll one out in a matter of weeks and crush any looming competition.
I give both of these startups 12-24 months, and the end won't be pretty.
Re: Airport Car Rentals: The Next $10 Billion Industry Ready For Disruption
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree on the second point, but then again, I'd never rent my house out with Airbnb either, and apparently they've done well. Different people have different tolerances for risk.
I think a key difference with Airbnb is that you have to be pretty clever to run a red light or over a pedestrian with someone's condo.
But less clever to turn it in to a meth lab.
Re: Airport Car Rentals: The Next $10 Billion Industry Ready For Disruption
#36I don't see much potential here. Airport car rental is mostly grunt work. Moving cars, storing them, valeting them, maintaining them, filling them with gas, sorting out insurance, customer service, screening customers, chasing late returns, pursuing people for damages, so on and so forth. 5% booking interface, 95% on the ground work. There is already healthy competition in the market, and the incumbents do a pretty g…
"A pretty good job" (not so pretty when you are waiting in-line for an hour) is not enough. If they can do the grunt work just as well, or better wrt refuelling/cleaning, and a better booking system, they will win.
You also missed the picture of car sharing.
Re: Airport Car Rentals: The Next $10 Billion Industry Ready For Disruption
#37Pretty cool ideas, not sure if I'd rent someone my car but I'd definitely rent someone else's.
Re: Airport Car Rentals: The Next $10 Billion Industry Ready For Disruption
#38People around SV might get the wrong idea of how bad airport car rentals are because the car rental center at SFO is probably the worst in the world.
I remember coming in on a delayed flight and riding the train out to the rental center, waiting in line half an hour, then finding the car parked in the space I was sent to was entirely different from what it was supposed to be (and the keys didn't work), going back and waiting in line again, getting a call from the satellite police station on my cell because my wife was wondering what happened to me, finally getting a car and remembering I never got a child seat but driving right out because I didn't want to wait in line again.
Sensible (unamerican) people just take the BART if they are going to SF. I didn't have that choice because we were going to San Luis Obispo.
I'll admit fueling can be a pain, but car rentals at other airports, even big ones, are nowhere near as bad.
At LAX, for instance, I reserved a Hertz car on Priceline, caught a shuttle bus to the car rental center, got the paperwork filled out quickly and drove off. On the way back they were handling a huge volume of returning automobiles but it was efficient, really a pleasure.
(I did make the mistake of thinking I could go north on the 405 at 5pm on a Friday... Had I known LA a little better, I'd have gone north on the surface streets which are easily accessible from the rental center.)
Re: Airport Car Rentals: The Next $10 Billion Industry Ready For Disruption
#39I don't see much potential here. Airport car rental is mostly grunt work. Moving cars, storing them, valeting them, maintaining them, filling them with gas, sorting out insurance, customer service, screening customers, chasing late returns, pursuing people for damages, so on and so forth. 5% booking interface, 95% on the ground work. There is already healthy competition in the market, and the incumbents do a pretty g…
"A pretty good job" (not so pretty when you are waiting in-line for an hour) is not enough. If they can do the grunt work just as well, or better wrt refuelling/cleaning, and a better booking system , they will win. You also missed the picture of car sharing.
> "A pretty good job" (not so pretty when you are waiting in-line for an hour) is not enough.
You can bet the leading companies have already invested huge amounts seeking out efficiency savings and ways to improve customer satisfaction.
Slow moving and bogged down in bureaucracy they may be, but if there were a simple way to avoid common customer complaints (e.g. long queues) without hurting the bottom line, they would already be doing it.
> You also missed the picture of car sharing.
I can't think of anyone I know who would even consider sharing their car. It's just an absolute minefield. It might just about work on a small scale, where you know and trust the people you are sharing with, but that kind of thing doesn't scale.
Re: Airport Car Rentals: The Next $10 Billion Industry Ready For Disruption
#40Airport car rentals tend to be pretty cheap ( AirBNB is competing with high priced hotels that often are booked and an existing inefficient P2P subleasing business. Uber is competing with taxi services notorious for poor responsiveness and frequent gaps in availability. I don't see the same room for disruption in the airport car rental market, but there is likely some room for innovation. Don't count on Hertz and Pay…
The biggest problem with car rental is the paper work - for some reason it can take five-ten minutes per customer to deal with, if nothing goes wrong. I've waited 20+ minutes on multiple occasions. There is literally no reason it can't be handled online well in advance (and it typically is, but for some reason it's repeated in person). Car rental needs something like airline self-service check-in kiosks more than Fli…
Join Hertz Gold and there is no paperwork. Totally worth it to me.